So, our local community news (and gossip mongering) of the moment is that our primary supermarkets are part of a class action lawsuit on account of deceptive pricing practices.
This doesn't exactly sound like new news to anybody, but I guess they went a little too far overboard during the pandemic years and now they have been caught with their hands a little too deep in the honeypot so to speak.
What am I talking about here?
I'm talking about the fairly common practice of supermarkets having a daily "regular price" for their products, but then increasing that regular daily price whenever they run that particular product on special.
For example, we might say that pork chops cost $4.00 a pound on regular price, but then they run a weekly promotion that pork chops are "50% off" but as part of offering that pork chop deal, the chops now suddenly have a "regular" price of $7.00 a pound, so at "50% off," they are now actually $3.50 a pound... or just slightly less than last week's regular price.
As the person who does most of the grocery shopping for our household, I've been well aware of this practice and recognize that it seems to be a staple part of how supermarkets in the USA do business.
Now, this may sound a little alien to you if you live in a different country where such practices are outright illegal and just don't happen. But trust me, here in the US they happen all the time!
I have actually come across a few extreme incidences where the on sale price turned out to be more than the regular price! That seems to particularly happen when there's an offer like "buy two get two free."
It has become a bit of a "Hot Topic" debate locally because on one side you have people who believe that you simply need to follow the old "buyer beware" truism, and know your prices, while on the other side you have a group of people who believe that you shouldn't have to be constantly on the lookout for being "cheated" when you go to large supposedly "reputable" supermarket chains.
Based on personal experience, there is little doubt that our local Safeway is engaging in some pretty sketchy practices from time to time.
For example they offer an ongoing deal where you can buy four packages of refrigerated Foods this would include meats and fish and Deli items from a certain section of the refrigerated coolers and pay $20 for four regardless of what they were priced at before. Whether that's actually a good deal might be open to debate but what I have noticed and this is the sketchy part is that I might be able to include a package of fish in this section that is marked at $9.99 a pound, and then I can walk over to the actual fish cooler no more than 50 feet away and find the same — or very similar — package of fish in the same packaging, for $6.99 a pound.
If you point this out, some store manager type will mutter "That must be a mistake, thanks for catching that!" and two days later, the issue repeats itself.
I often find myself shaking my head when I encounter things like this, and I'm grateful for the fact that I don't look at "percentages off" or free deals, but only at my own knowledge of what the typical reasonable-to-cheap price for a particular product is... per package or per pound.
But of course, not everybody wants to actually carry an encyclopedia of current grocery shopping prices around in their head!
And so, we end up with lawsuits.
Which — in turn — leaves us with the interesting moral and ethical dilemma of considering whether we should just accept it as normal that we live in a world where being a consumer and being a retailer means that you are engaged in a constant "chess match" in which one is trying to get an advantage over the other, and you have to be on your toes 100% of the time in order to not get taken advantage of.
Alternatively, you might feel that you should be able to trust major retailers to not be trying to rip you off all the time so at least you can relax a little bit and look at what's on the shelves, instead of memorizing prices.
Personally, I recognize this as being part of my reality, but that doesn't mean that I like it and frankly I find it exhausting to have to be "on" 100% of the time when I'm out in the world and for that matter on the Internet.
I would much rather live in the world where a sense of fundamental ethical decency was the norm rather than the exception.
At the same time, we can ask ourselves the question of how we even got to this state of affairs.
The sad truth there might well be that most supermarkets operate on razor thin margins, and the vast majority of consumers in the USA of 2023 are getting to the point where their budgets are so thin that every single penny counts all the time. There is no Comfort Zone — no "slush fund" — on either side of that equation.
In a sense, it's a sad social and economic commentary on the fact that almost nobody's making it anymore. And that is, perhaps, more what I have a problem with than the potentially deceptive pricing practices of supermarkets. If everybody wasn't struggling so much, we likely wouldn't have this issue...
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!
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Created at 2023-06-16 01:20 PST
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